Home life
Thick and thin
Alice Thomas Ellis
Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we diet. These words seemed to hang in the air last week as Janet and I planned an assault course on our persons. I had been told of this diet which gives you all the nutrition the body requires while having The same reducing effect as starvation. Well, today we started on it. You take, three times daily, a bowl of a sort of thinnish gruel in various flavours which While not actually nauseating sure ain't too delicious. 'Never mind,' I said comforting- ly. 'You're allowed to add a spoonful of curry powder to it sometimes.' 0oh,' said Janet gloomily. 'Curried minestrone. Sounds really nice.' No nibbling, no fruit Juice, no alcohol. Black decaffeinated cof- fee is permitted, and unsweetened tisanes, and you have to drink a lot of water. Lord, l'Ic'w I hate water: especially the stuff that Comes out of London taps. I forget the statistics about how many kidneys it's Passed through, but they don't endear it to !Ile. Besides, we have lead pipes bearing it into the house, so I think it's dangerous.! never touch it normally. The odd thing is that after two bowls of the gruel I feel as high as a kite. Fasting has this effect on me but .I haven't been fasting. Janet is rather ?nylons as it's had no effect on her at all. Just think,' she says. 'We can look forward to another bowlful of this tonight.' I hope I am not giving the impression that Janet and I are at present grossly proportioned. We are not, but some of our frocks are a bit snug and we can't afford to buy new ones. We had a lodger once who went up and down like an air-cushion and it cost him a fortune having his clothes altered by a tailor. He was forever having his trousers taken in or let out and he had hundreds of shirts in different collar-sizes.
Weight is a very peculiar thing. I can still get into the jodhpurs which I wore when I was 15 but my wedding dress barely covers the front of me. It fits the daughter perfectly except for being a bit roomy round the bosom and she only weighs eight stone. When we married, someone and I both weighed nine stone and I considered myself fat and him skinny. I don't under- stand. Another mystery is that my wedding shoes (gold-sequinned sandals, very taste- ful) will now go nowhere near my feet. No one ever told me that one's feet grow after the age of 21. My hands are the same size as they always were, but then I don't walk on them. Perhaps all those years of plod- ding round on one's feet makes them swell, and I don't believe any amOunt of dieting, will turn them back into size threes. I don't care either.
The worst thing about dieting, apart from the fact that it is possible to be extremely boring on the subject, is that it disinclines one from cooking for other people. I really have no desire to toss together a delicious little boeuf bourguig- non for the family while I sit lapping my gruel, so we may all end up rather thin.
The third son has just returned from Italy and tells me of a fellow guest, a girl, who resolutely refused to eat the local produce, insisting on bacon and egg and hamburgers and chips. He says her hosts got a bit fed up with her, as I can well imagine they might, but they were not altogether surprised as there is a local legend about the time just after the, war when a trainload of British soldiers got snowbound in some pass. After many days a relief train arrived bearing great vats of spaghetti and they all, starving as they were, refused to eat it on the grounds that it was foreign and there might be garlic or oil in it. Yuk. They would have preferred to eat each other.
My uncle Theo once swelled up to nearly 20 stone and his doctors advised him to slim. He did. He got quite lissom and people kept saying to him, `There, Theo, I bet you feel much better now, don't you?', and he said he didn't, he felt bloody awful. I know this syndrome. I sometimes give up smoking, and when I do after a while my body assumes that it must be ill since whenever I deprive it of nicotine it has always meant it's got bronchitis or morning sickness or some equally tiresome malaise, and it rebels. When my body rebels I get depressed, so it all seems rather pointless. It is indicating at the moment that it really does not care to entertain another bowl of gruel, so I think I'll pass on that one. Janet was heroic at teatime. She made tunafish sandwiches for the children, and tunafish is almost her favourite thing in the world. Not one morsel passed her lips.
I'm going to bed because I simply cannot fancy a warm chicken milk-shake.
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